Before the left gets too precious about David Davis' reported comments on the 'brokeback coalition', we should give our sluggish short-term memories something of a workout. Erudite and edifying though schoolyard slurs of this kind may be, they are neither new nor exclusive to the right.
Remember Harriet Harman's cheeky suggestion, in her first speech as leader of the opposition, that “while the happy couple are enjoying the thrill of the rose garden, the in-laws are saying that they are just not right for each other”? Remember all those headlines about ‘a very civil partnership’ and ‘a man-date to govern’? Playground gay jokes have been employed across the political spectrum to cast aspersions on the new government from day one.
It’s a troubling trend, and not just because of the obvious problems with equating male homosexuality, even in jest, with something the press and politicians find unnatural, suspicious and uncomfortable. The conceit is dazzling in its banality, substituting genuine political analysis for sniggering dick-jokes: it’s carry-on commentating, and it manages to belittle all parties involved whilst failing to enlighten us one iota about the reasons for the fractures already emerging in the new government.
The discomfort underlying all the ‘Eton fag’ and ‘brokeback partnership’ catcalls is multiferous, but it’s hard not to get the impression that a coalition government is somehow not daddy enough for us: that political partnerships and electoral reform are somehow not manly enough for the tough, thrusting, winner-takes-all tradition of British politics. And as any thirteen-year-old boy can tell you, anything with the slightest hint of hetero-abnormality is gay, and gay is, like, completely rubbish. Obviously.
There is substantial historical precedent for homosexual inference as a form of satire: from Tacitus to the Earl of Rochester the suggestion has implied decadence, depravity and dodgy politics. In 1791, at the height of the French revolution, an anonymous French writer circulated the scandalous "Memoirs of Antonina: Displying the Private intrigues and Uncommon Passions...of Great Persons," a burlesque intended to mock the court of Louis XVI by implying that Marie Antoinette was an Indigo-Girls-listening, sandal-wearing, alfalfa-sprout-eating lesbian, or 'tribade' in the language of the day. 'Antonina' was genuinely subversive in a way that contemporary ‘brokeback coalition’ jokes are not, because at the time popular derision of the monarchy was a serious and dangerous undertaking. Nonetheless, it has always been easier to chuckle about the gays than to actually engage with the shortfalls of any particular government.
There is much to criticise about this coalition, not least the fact that ultimately, it’s the vulnerable, the difficult and the poor whom our new leaders are busy screwing, not each other. In this context, knob jokes are both offensive and unhelpful – although the particular notion of a ‘brokeback coalition’ is more apt that David Davis or John Redwood might realise.
The film ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is not, as has been intimated, the simple tale of a cosy gay relationship, but the story of a love affair between two men from deeply conservative backgrounds, plagued by insecurity and doubt and frightened of retribution from their communities. The movie ends in violence, disappointment and betrayal. Many members of the press and political class seem to be fostering a hope that this government will end the same way – but for those of us who happen to prefer gay sex to slashing the welfare state, the prospect of another four years of schoolyard homophobia is a grim one.
Showing posts with label new statesman blogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new statesman blogs. Show all posts
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Deference and defeatism vs. youth revolution.
When I closed the final pages of Francis Beckett's new book, ‘What Did The Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?’, I found myself shaking with indignation. The book, which lays out an incisive case for how my parents generation “squandered the good times” and betrayed the courage of the Attlee settlement, is flawed and uneven in many ways, but it makes at least one important observation. “The sixties generation,” says Beckett, “reinstalled the deference it rejected.” In other words, our mums and dads were free to get angry with adults, dabble in revolutionary politics and demand respect and attention, but heaven help Generation Y if we fail to comply with the grown-ups’ view of the world.
When I look at the defeated deference with which my generation treats its elders, I want to take young people by their collective shoulders and shake them. The young are in the process of being screwed over in a variety of cold and creative ways by an age group who are richer, freer and more powerful than any generation this country has seen or is likely to see again, and yet we have so far failed to come up with any sort of collective response to indignities that the baby boomers simply would not have stood for when they were young.
It’s conceivable that our parents love us, in their own special way, but that hasn't stopped them from mortgaging our futures and selling off all the privileges that they took for granted - the jobs, the safe places to live, the affordable housing, the free education and the security of a generous and supportive welfare state. The fact that our parents had all of these things allowed them to produce a sustained cultural rebellion that was, in many ways, genuinely socially transformative. The fact that we have none of them makes us timid, compliant and tragically quick to accept compromise.
I find myself dying a little inside, for example, whenever I hear a bright young liberal telling me that they're supporting Ed Miliband for Labour leader. I have nothing against Ed Miliband, but that's just the problem: the most decisive thing I've heard said about Ed Miliband by the next generation of the British left is that they've nothing against him. When I ask them why, they generally look awkward, mumble something about progressive ideas, and then say: he's a nice guy, and he’s quite good on the environment, he’s a good compromise for Labour supporters from across the spectrum, and hey, he wasn’t around to vote in favour of the Iraq war.
And then they do that awful little smile, that hard, tight little smile forced up at the corners with those wide, willing eyes, the smile of submission and desperation, the expression I've seen on young people's faces so many times since the credit crisis crunched down on our futures, the expression I've worn myself at countless job interviews, and they say: 'and at least he's not as bad as any of the others.'
When our parents were young, Beckett reminds us, some of them not only dared to imagine alternatives to militarism but demonstrated to demand a politics that reflected their ideals rather than those of the overculture. By contrast, I was there when this video, which features prominently on Miliband junior’s campaign website, was being shot. Wait for the final three seconds: the young volunteer does the smile, and then delivers the line ‘go, Ed’ as mournfully as if he were speaking at a memorial service for a spirit of generational rebellion that crumpled at some point in the mid 1990s and inoffensively, quietly died.
Why does my generation seem so spineless? Fear is the reason, rather than lack of fervor. We all know what’s going on, but we blanch at asking for the rights and respect our parents enjoyed because we’ve all seen what happened to those of our classmates and university friends who didn’t play the game, smile on cue, pass the exams every year and give the grown-ups what they wanted. For the baby boomers, as Beckett astutely observes, the risks of rebellion were far lower than they are for us: rejecting your parents’ rules is far easier when you can rely on full employment, a supportive welfare state, free higher education and a culture that respects and nurtures young talent to catch you when you fall through the net.
Both of my parents are working-class kids who quit school during their A-levels, and both are now wealthy, property-owning professionals, as are many of their friends who spent the 1970s doing drugs, playing music and rearranging the world to suit their ideals. How many of today’s impoverished drop-outs will be able to say the same in forty years?
“We were young in a kinder society,” Beckett pronounces of his generation. “If we really meant any of the things we said in the sixties, about peace, about education, about freedom, we would have created a better world for our children to grow up in.” Today’s young people decline to openly reject our parents, because most of us have no other option, but we know perfectly well that we’ve been had. Whether or not we continue to bite off our resentment behind forced smiles is up to us.
When I look at the defeated deference with which my generation treats its elders, I want to take young people by their collective shoulders and shake them. The young are in the process of being screwed over in a variety of cold and creative ways by an age group who are richer, freer and more powerful than any generation this country has seen or is likely to see again, and yet we have so far failed to come up with any sort of collective response to indignities that the baby boomers simply would not have stood for when they were young.
It’s conceivable that our parents love us, in their own special way, but that hasn't stopped them from mortgaging our futures and selling off all the privileges that they took for granted - the jobs, the safe places to live, the affordable housing, the free education and the security of a generous and supportive welfare state. The fact that our parents had all of these things allowed them to produce a sustained cultural rebellion that was, in many ways, genuinely socially transformative. The fact that we have none of them makes us timid, compliant and tragically quick to accept compromise.
I find myself dying a little inside, for example, whenever I hear a bright young liberal telling me that they're supporting Ed Miliband for Labour leader. I have nothing against Ed Miliband, but that's just the problem: the most decisive thing I've heard said about Ed Miliband by the next generation of the British left is that they've nothing against him. When I ask them why, they generally look awkward, mumble something about progressive ideas, and then say: he's a nice guy, and he’s quite good on the environment, he’s a good compromise for Labour supporters from across the spectrum, and hey, he wasn’t around to vote in favour of the Iraq war.
And then they do that awful little smile, that hard, tight little smile forced up at the corners with those wide, willing eyes, the smile of submission and desperation, the expression I've seen on young people's faces so many times since the credit crisis crunched down on our futures, the expression I've worn myself at countless job interviews, and they say: 'and at least he's not as bad as any of the others.'
When our parents were young, Beckett reminds us, some of them not only dared to imagine alternatives to militarism but demonstrated to demand a politics that reflected their ideals rather than those of the overculture. By contrast, I was there when this video, which features prominently on Miliband junior’s campaign website, was being shot. Wait for the final three seconds: the young volunteer does the smile, and then delivers the line ‘go, Ed’ as mournfully as if he were speaking at a memorial service for a spirit of generational rebellion that crumpled at some point in the mid 1990s and inoffensively, quietly died.
Why does my generation seem so spineless? Fear is the reason, rather than lack of fervor. We all know what’s going on, but we blanch at asking for the rights and respect our parents enjoyed because we’ve all seen what happened to those of our classmates and university friends who didn’t play the game, smile on cue, pass the exams every year and give the grown-ups what they wanted. For the baby boomers, as Beckett astutely observes, the risks of rebellion were far lower than they are for us: rejecting your parents’ rules is far easier when you can rely on full employment, a supportive welfare state, free higher education and a culture that respects and nurtures young talent to catch you when you fall through the net.
Both of my parents are working-class kids who quit school during their A-levels, and both are now wealthy, property-owning professionals, as are many of their friends who spent the 1970s doing drugs, playing music and rearranging the world to suit their ideals. How many of today’s impoverished drop-outs will be able to say the same in forty years?
“We were young in a kinder society,” Beckett pronounces of his generation. “If we really meant any of the things we said in the sixties, about peace, about education, about freedom, we would have created a better world for our children to grow up in.” Today’s young people decline to openly reject our parents, because most of us have no other option, but we know perfectly well that we’ve been had. Whether or not we continue to bite off our resentment behind forced smiles is up to us.
Sunday, 11 July 2010
Mancession? Get real.
This week, the press seems unable to decide whether the recession is going to be good for men and bad for women, or good for women and bad for men. The latter scenario has even acquired its own cloying portmanteau – the ‘mancession’ – as journalists attempt to eke column inches out of the wobbly implication of a financial gender war. The possibility that something more systemic and pernicious is going on simply hasn’t crossed the consciences of headline writers, who understand the value of simplifying every social equation to a playground scrap between the girls and the boys.
Arguments on both sides of this weary discussion are bloating the pages of every major liberal media outlet. Should we worry about men, as suggested by Will Hutton in the Guardian and Alice Miles in New Statesman, or should we worry about women, as per Deborah Orr in the Guardian and Samira Shackle in New Statesman? The answer, of course, is that we should worry about the poor, whatever their genital arrangement.
It’s not that gender doesn’t matter in this recession. On the contrary; it matters a great deal. As a society, we have been torturously slow in coming to terms with the real, permanent effects that the cultural changes of the past fifty years have had on our economic organisation. At the annual Marxism conference at the Institute of Education last weekend, Feminist academic Dr Nina Power observed that the ‘feminization’ of the British workforce has allowed employers to hold down wages in real terms so that a single salary is no longer enough to support a family, leading to “a race to the bottom in which everyone loses.” The change in the organisation of families as economic units, the shift in patterns of employment away from traditionally ‘male’ heavy industry towards jobs in the service sector, the concentration of women in low-paid, part-time and insecure work – these are all factors which will have a bearing upon how this country weathers the economic storms ahead. They are factors that require a far more subtle response than ‘who’s winning – men or women?’
Meanwhile, right-wing opportunists like Iain Duncan Smith and David Willetts seem to view the economic downturn as a perfect excuse to shrink the state until it’s small enough to fit into people’s bedrooms, with clunkily recalcitrant social engineering projects such as the government’s attack on single mothers. Gender matters in this recession. What doesn’t matter is trying to figure out which gender is ‘winning’ and which is ‘losing’.
Arguments on both sides of this weary discussion are bloating the pages of every major liberal media outlet. Should we worry about men, as suggested by Will Hutton in the Guardian and Alice Miles in New Statesman, or should we worry about women, as per Deborah Orr in the Guardian and Samira Shackle in New Statesman? The answer, of course, is that we should worry about the poor, whatever their genital arrangement.
It’s not that gender doesn’t matter in this recession. On the contrary; it matters a great deal. As a society, we have been torturously slow in coming to terms with the real, permanent effects that the cultural changes of the past fifty years have had on our economic organisation. At the annual Marxism conference at the Institute of Education last weekend, Feminist academic Dr Nina Power observed that the ‘feminization’ of the British workforce has allowed employers to hold down wages in real terms so that a single salary is no longer enough to support a family, leading to “a race to the bottom in which everyone loses.” The change in the organisation of families as economic units, the shift in patterns of employment away from traditionally ‘male’ heavy industry towards jobs in the service sector, the concentration of women in low-paid, part-time and insecure work – these are all factors which will have a bearing upon how this country weathers the economic storms ahead. They are factors that require a far more subtle response than ‘who’s winning – men or women?’
Meanwhile, right-wing opportunists like Iain Duncan Smith and David Willetts seem to view the economic downturn as a perfect excuse to shrink the state until it’s small enough to fit into people’s bedrooms, with clunkily recalcitrant social engineering projects such as the government’s attack on single mothers. Gender matters in this recession. What doesn’t matter is trying to figure out which gender is ‘winning’ and which is ‘losing’.
Let’s be witheringly clear: there’s only one group of people who will remain secure and comfortable at everyone else’s expense over the next few years, and that’s the rich. As the Coalition sets out to prise away vital support from those who need it most, as new graduates haemmorage into the dole queue and Tory peers anticipate that housing benefit cuts will create "casualties", the richest people in the country have just seen their collective wealth rise by 30% in the tax year to April 2010. The profits raked in by Britain’s richest 1000 people over the past twelve months total £77billion – almost as much as the £83bn of public spending that George Osborne has promised to cut, endangering the homes and jobs of millions. Whilst the liberal press ties itself in knots over whether women or men will do worse out of the crisis, the wealthy – including the financiers whose toxic speculations caused the crash– are largely exempt from the narrow public conversation about social justice.
As the recession closes its jaws on Britain, both sexes are losing out, in different ways and for different reasons. We all live together, and we all have a stake in protecting each other from further economic hardship, and in these circumstances playing on latent public mistrust of the opposite sex is breathtakingly unhelpful. The 'mancession' debate is entirely lacking in the sense of political totality that is desperately needed if the left is to build a coherent resistance to these cuts.
I expect, in ten years or so, after a double-dip recession has brutalised this country even further, after the lost generation has been lost for good and the welfare state has been throttled into redundancy, someone in an office somewhere will be able to sit down with a calculator and work out once and for all who had it worse: men or women. But social justice is far more than a giant balance sheet with men on one side and women on the other, and this time the pundits have it dangerously wrong. This is not a gender war. This is class war.
Friday, 9 July 2010
Internships auctioned at Oxford university.
On the bus this morning, a young father was distributing pocket money to his three small children. The eldest was kicking the back of my chair in bone-jarringly rhythmic anticipation of being taken to town for a day's shopping, but when he received his small handout, the kicking stopped.
'I'm not going to spend my three pounds, dad," announced the boy, "I'm going to save it, and then I’m going to save all my pocket money, and then I can go to university and get a good job."
This may, of course, have been the sort of cunning ploy to wheedle extra cash out of your parents that anyone who was ever a smartarse seven-year-old will recognise. It speaks volumes about the state of social equality, though, that whilst this primary school pupil from inner London was contemplating forfeiting an entire childhood's worth of treats to afford a chance at higher education and fulfilling work, wealthy Oxford graduates were taking up prestigious internships which they had purchased at a lavish charity auction held at the university last month.
Students who attended the opulent Red Couture Ball, entry tickets for which were priced at up to £300, were able to bid thousands of pounds for coveted professional placements with law firms and fashion designers. A mini-pupillage with barrister Neil Kitchener QC was under the hammer, alongside designer gowns, hotel breaks and other goodies only available to the extremely well-off. Sam Frieman, co-organiser of the auction, told The Cherwell that "you can only come to the auction if you have paid for a ticket. In response to the criticism that a lot of people could be priced out, I would say, 'that's life'."
Internships like these are now prerequisites for many jobs, and most interns work extremely hard to obtain and finance work placements. "As someone from a low-income, East Midlands background, this auction is another reminder that I'm at a disadvantage because I can't afford an internship,” said recent Oxford graduate Kate Gresswell, 21. Relative inequality within the Oxbridge system is hardly the pressing issue of our day, but if even Oxford graduates are finding that money matters more than merit in the job market, something has gone terribly wrong in our social calculations.
The internship system is already expensive enough to exclude all but the richest and most fortunate young people from popular jobs. I could pretend, for example, that it's my winning smile and blatant genius which have enabled me to find work as a journalist - but a year's unpaid interning, during which I survived on a small inheritance from a dead relative, had just as much to do with it. Any graduate or school-leaver without the means to support themselves in London whilst working for free can currently forget about a career in journalism, politics, the arts, finance, the legal profession or any of a number of other sectors whose business models are now based around a lower tier of unpaid labour.
After the relative levelling of university, class reasserts itself with whiplash force as graduates from low-income backgrounds find the doors of opportunity slammed in their faces. Last week, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development called for employers to be legally obliged to pay interns a minimum wage of £2.50 an hour, but such a step is unlikely to be taken by the Coalition, which has already made it breathtakingly clear that preventing young people from falling through the cracks in our society is not likely to be a priority any time soon.
With seventy applicants for every new vacancy, with over a million young people unemployed and with millions more languishing in insecure, temporary and poorly-paid work, the job market is now open only to those who can afford to buy their way in. The Telegraph reports that across the country hundreds of placements are being sold or brokered, often at similar auctions for the wealthy, where the fact that proceeds go to charity gives the new nobility yet another reason to be smug about affording the life chances that previous generations enjoyed for free.
For the few of us who are wealthy enough to finance ourselves through work placements, only a firm push is needed to force open the doors of opportunity. Without a coordinated effort to reverse this regressive trend, the years to come will be littered with wasted potential and filled with disappointments for young people with nothing to bring to the table but talent, creativity and ambition.
'I'm not going to spend my three pounds, dad," announced the boy, "I'm going to save it, and then I’m going to save all my pocket money, and then I can go to university and get a good job."
This may, of course, have been the sort of cunning ploy to wheedle extra cash out of your parents that anyone who was ever a smartarse seven-year-old will recognise. It speaks volumes about the state of social equality, though, that whilst this primary school pupil from inner London was contemplating forfeiting an entire childhood's worth of treats to afford a chance at higher education and fulfilling work, wealthy Oxford graduates were taking up prestigious internships which they had purchased at a lavish charity auction held at the university last month.
Students who attended the opulent Red Couture Ball, entry tickets for which were priced at up to £300, were able to bid thousands of pounds for coveted professional placements with law firms and fashion designers. A mini-pupillage with barrister Neil Kitchener QC was under the hammer, alongside designer gowns, hotel breaks and other goodies only available to the extremely well-off. Sam Frieman, co-organiser of the auction, told The Cherwell that "you can only come to the auction if you have paid for a ticket. In response to the criticism that a lot of people could be priced out, I would say, 'that's life'."
Internships like these are now prerequisites for many jobs, and most interns work extremely hard to obtain and finance work placements. "As someone from a low-income, East Midlands background, this auction is another reminder that I'm at a disadvantage because I can't afford an internship,” said recent Oxford graduate Kate Gresswell, 21. Relative inequality within the Oxbridge system is hardly the pressing issue of our day, but if even Oxford graduates are finding that money matters more than merit in the job market, something has gone terribly wrong in our social calculations.
The internship system is already expensive enough to exclude all but the richest and most fortunate young people from popular jobs. I could pretend, for example, that it's my winning smile and blatant genius which have enabled me to find work as a journalist - but a year's unpaid interning, during which I survived on a small inheritance from a dead relative, had just as much to do with it. Any graduate or school-leaver without the means to support themselves in London whilst working for free can currently forget about a career in journalism, politics, the arts, finance, the legal profession or any of a number of other sectors whose business models are now based around a lower tier of unpaid labour.
After the relative levelling of university, class reasserts itself with whiplash force as graduates from low-income backgrounds find the doors of opportunity slammed in their faces. Last week, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development called for employers to be legally obliged to pay interns a minimum wage of £2.50 an hour, but such a step is unlikely to be taken by the Coalition, which has already made it breathtakingly clear that preventing young people from falling through the cracks in our society is not likely to be a priority any time soon.
With seventy applicants for every new vacancy, with over a million young people unemployed and with millions more languishing in insecure, temporary and poorly-paid work, the job market is now open only to those who can afford to buy their way in. The Telegraph reports that across the country hundreds of placements are being sold or brokered, often at similar auctions for the wealthy, where the fact that proceeds go to charity gives the new nobility yet another reason to be smug about affording the life chances that previous generations enjoyed for free.
For the few of us who are wealthy enough to finance ourselves through work placements, only a firm push is needed to force open the doors of opportunity. Without a coordinated effort to reverse this regressive trend, the years to come will be littered with wasted potential and filled with disappointments for young people with nothing to bring to the table but talent, creativity and ambition.
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Labour's fingerprints are all over this budget.
Panto season came early this year. Watching Gideon George Osborne take the floor on Tuesday to announce the execution of the welfare state was a bit like being in the audience at a raucous Christmas show, with booing and howling on cue from the Labour benches as the Chancellor tore successive chunks out of sickness benefit, housing benefit, lone parent support and the dole before setting out plans for a wildly regressive VAT hike, a freeze on public sector pay and a hefty tax break for businesses.
The sheer brazenness of it all felt farcical, almost unreal. You half expected Osborne to burst into a musical number about how fun it is to be the baddie, announce the closure of all orphanages and vanish from the Commons in a puff of green smoke. The response from Labour and the liberal press has been equally pantomimic. After all, when a new cabinet of whose members 80% are personally millionaires pulverises welfare and housing with a fistful of broken sums before declaring that 'we're all in this together', what can you really say except 'oh no, we're not’?
By far the most astute summary came from activist and comedian Mark Thomas, who tweeted: "that wasn't so much a budget as class war committed with a calculator." The controlled ferocity of the emergency budget was almost kinky, presuming you have a fetish for being kicked repeatedly in the soul by a man with a stack of papers and a glass of mineral water. Labour and the liberal press have condemned the proposals – but the fiery indignation of Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling rings hollow when one considers that the groundwork for many of the proposed welfare cuts was already in place before Labour lost the election.
Uncomfortable as it may be for the left to recall, some of the most regressive changes in this budget - from forcing lone parents with school-age children into work, to sanctions for the mentally ill and long-term jobless, to elimination tests for sickness benefits - were Labour policies just a few short months ago. As the liberal press laments the proposed rationing of disability living allowance, it seems to have forgotten that Labour has already cleaned up on every other benefit offered to the infirm.
In 2009, the Labour Representation Committee accused the government of ripping off Tory welfare reform proposals wholesale. They were right: Labour’s green paper on benefit reform and the then shadow cabinet’s proposals to downsize and privatise the welfare state were functionally identical. In January, John Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford explained in an essay for New Statesman how Labour had ‘lost its way’ on welfare, abandoning the long-term jobless and undermining state support for the most vulnerable, with tragic consequences.
Earlier this year, the BBC exposed the brutality of the new Employment and Support Allowance tests, which are designed to deny sick people benefit by any means necessary and which have required patients dying of cancer to prove their incapacity by walking until they fall over. Despite the absurdity of imposing punitive ‘incentives to work’ in a climate where there is simply no work to be had, outliers like John McDonnell who have spoken out against welfare reform were condemned as cranks, and during the general election campaign not one Labour member made the strong case for social justice and a protective welfare state that so many of us ached to hear.
Osborne’s emergency budget is class war and nothing else, unashamedly shoring up the private sector whilst stripping vital support from those who already have nothing. The bitter truth, however, is that Osborne would not have been able to get away with this had New Labour not already laid the ideological foundation for the destruction of welfare in Britain.
For those of us who have lived at the sharp edge of Labour’s welfare reforms, for those of us who lost homes, friends and partners to poverty and unemployment, for those of us who have organised, campaigned and fought to push stories about the savagery of benefit sanctions into the press, the centre-left’s sudden attack of conscience is colossally insulting. For the young, the sick and the poor, the energy of Labour’s outrage over welfare reform has come far too late.
The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley commented that these cuts represent “the absolute triumph” of the Tories’ “softening-up process” - but that process occurred under Labour. At some point over the past decade, it became acceptable to stereotype families and communities as ‘scroungers', to scapegoat lone parents and the long-term jobless, and to imply that the long-term sick are merely malingering. Somehow, it became admissible to speak of poverty and hopelessness as ‘incentives to work’. Somehow, it became conscionable for the left to refer to welfare provision as ‘a drain on the state’ rather than a central, vital function of the state.
For the millions of us who have relied on meagre welfare support to survive the first dip of this recession, it was New Labour who held us down whilst we waited for the inevitable punches from the right. And in one way, news of the Coalition's outright assault on the life chances and dignity of the poor hurts a little less, because we saw it coming. Being smacked in the face is less painful than being stabbed in the back.
In the weeks and months to come, Labour might just begin remember that it is not the party of business, the party of corporate Britain, but the party of Nye Bevan, Clement Atlee and Barbara Castle, the party of working people and the poor, the party of the NHS, of university grants, of chartists and levellers and diggers and dreamers, of trade unions and of the welfare state. Over the coming years of pain, Labour will serve the ordinary people of Britain best if it remembers its core values. For some of us, however, it may already be too late.
The sheer brazenness of it all felt farcical, almost unreal. You half expected Osborne to burst into a musical number about how fun it is to be the baddie, announce the closure of all orphanages and vanish from the Commons in a puff of green smoke. The response from Labour and the liberal press has been equally pantomimic. After all, when a new cabinet of whose members 80% are personally millionaires pulverises welfare and housing with a fistful of broken sums before declaring that 'we're all in this together', what can you really say except 'oh no, we're not’?
By far the most astute summary came from activist and comedian Mark Thomas, who tweeted: "that wasn't so much a budget as class war committed with a calculator." The controlled ferocity of the emergency budget was almost kinky, presuming you have a fetish for being kicked repeatedly in the soul by a man with a stack of papers and a glass of mineral water. Labour and the liberal press have condemned the proposals – but the fiery indignation of Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling rings hollow when one considers that the groundwork for many of the proposed welfare cuts was already in place before Labour lost the election.
Uncomfortable as it may be for the left to recall, some of the most regressive changes in this budget - from forcing lone parents with school-age children into work, to sanctions for the mentally ill and long-term jobless, to elimination tests for sickness benefits - were Labour policies just a few short months ago. As the liberal press laments the proposed rationing of disability living allowance, it seems to have forgotten that Labour has already cleaned up on every other benefit offered to the infirm.
In 2009, the Labour Representation Committee accused the government of ripping off Tory welfare reform proposals wholesale. They were right: Labour’s green paper on benefit reform and the then shadow cabinet’s proposals to downsize and privatise the welfare state were functionally identical. In January, John Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford explained in an essay for New Statesman how Labour had ‘lost its way’ on welfare, abandoning the long-term jobless and undermining state support for the most vulnerable, with tragic consequences.
Earlier this year, the BBC exposed the brutality of the new Employment and Support Allowance tests, which are designed to deny sick people benefit by any means necessary and which have required patients dying of cancer to prove their incapacity by walking until they fall over. Despite the absurdity of imposing punitive ‘incentives to work’ in a climate where there is simply no work to be had, outliers like John McDonnell who have spoken out against welfare reform were condemned as cranks, and during the general election campaign not one Labour member made the strong case for social justice and a protective welfare state that so many of us ached to hear.
Osborne’s emergency budget is class war and nothing else, unashamedly shoring up the private sector whilst stripping vital support from those who already have nothing. The bitter truth, however, is that Osborne would not have been able to get away with this had New Labour not already laid the ideological foundation for the destruction of welfare in Britain.
For those of us who have lived at the sharp edge of Labour’s welfare reforms, for those of us who lost homes, friends and partners to poverty and unemployment, for those of us who have organised, campaigned and fought to push stories about the savagery of benefit sanctions into the press, the centre-left’s sudden attack of conscience is colossally insulting. For the young, the sick and the poor, the energy of Labour’s outrage over welfare reform has come far too late.
The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley commented that these cuts represent “the absolute triumph” of the Tories’ “softening-up process” - but that process occurred under Labour. At some point over the past decade, it became acceptable to stereotype families and communities as ‘scroungers', to scapegoat lone parents and the long-term jobless, and to imply that the long-term sick are merely malingering. Somehow, it became admissible to speak of poverty and hopelessness as ‘incentives to work’. Somehow, it became conscionable for the left to refer to welfare provision as ‘a drain on the state’ rather than a central, vital function of the state.
For the millions of us who have relied on meagre welfare support to survive the first dip of this recession, it was New Labour who held us down whilst we waited for the inevitable punches from the right. And in one way, news of the Coalition's outright assault on the life chances and dignity of the poor hurts a little less, because we saw it coming. Being smacked in the face is less painful than being stabbed in the back.
In the weeks and months to come, Labour might just begin remember that it is not the party of business, the party of corporate Britain, but the party of Nye Bevan, Clement Atlee and Barbara Castle, the party of working people and the poor, the party of the NHS, of university grants, of chartists and levellers and diggers and dreamers, of trade unions and of the welfare state. Over the coming years of pain, Labour will serve the ordinary people of Britain best if it remembers its core values. For some of us, however, it may already be too late.
Saturday, 29 May 2010
A modesty slip for misogyny.
Slip away the modesty cloth of faux-feminist posturing over the veil and you'll find an ugly skin of nationalism, male intolerance and misogyny.
In his article Thinly Veiled Threat, Mehdi Hasan impressively fails to assume that the debate over the niqab and burqa - recently outlawed in Belgium, with similar laws tabled across Europe - is all about him. This sets him apart from nearly every man writing, legislating and proclaiming about this most symbolically loaded piece of clothing.
Hasan's piece is learned and thorough, but it misses perhaps the most fundamental question about the veil debate. The question is not to what extent the veil can be considered oppressive, but whether it is ever justifiable for men to mandate how women should look, dress and behave in the name of cultural preservation.
Male culture has always chosen to define itself by how it permits its women to dress and behave. Footage recorded in 2008 shows a young member of the British National Party expounding upon the right of the average working man in Leeds to "look at women wearing low-cut tops in the street". The speaker declares the practice is "part of British history - and more important than human rights", and laments that "they" - variously, Muslims, foreigners and feminists - want to "take it away from us".
Never mind the right of the women in question to wear what they want or, for that matter, to walk down that Leeds street without fear of the entitled harassment made extremely explicit in this speech. This is not about women. This is about men, and how men define themselves against other men. [read the rest at New Statesman]
In his article Thinly Veiled Threat, Mehdi Hasan impressively fails to assume that the debate over the niqab and burqa - recently outlawed in Belgium, with similar laws tabled across Europe - is all about him. This sets him apart from nearly every man writing, legislating and proclaiming about this most symbolically loaded piece of clothing.
Hasan's piece is learned and thorough, but it misses perhaps the most fundamental question about the veil debate. The question is not to what extent the veil can be considered oppressive, but whether it is ever justifiable for men to mandate how women should look, dress and behave in the name of cultural preservation.
Male culture has always chosen to define itself by how it permits its women to dress and behave. Footage recorded in 2008 shows a young member of the British National Party expounding upon the right of the average working man in Leeds to "look at women wearing low-cut tops in the street". The speaker declares the practice is "part of British history - and more important than human rights", and laments that "they" - variously, Muslims, foreigners and feminists - want to "take it away from us".
Never mind the right of the women in question to wear what they want or, for that matter, to walk down that Leeds street without fear of the entitled harassment made extremely explicit in this speech. This is not about women. This is about men, and how men define themselves against other men. [read the rest at New Statesman]
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